"My Story"

Ken Larsen, June 25, 1997

My parents immigrated to USA from Denmark in 1931 and settled in a Danish community in Western Iowa. We always spoke Danish in the home and most children in the area spoke Danish, so I did not learn English until I started school.

This one room country school house had about 38 students spanning all eight grades. The teacher was just 20 years old, a high school graduate, who attended a one-year "Normal School". In September of 1937, I started school as my teacher was beginning her second year as a teacher.

I was one of three students in the first grade (one third of my first grade class could not speak english) and began learning English with whatever special help this busy teacher could give to me.

The year before there were four children in the first grade and two of them could not speak English. (50% of that class) Some of the classes beyond that had very few English speaking students as they came to the first grade at Cuppy's Grove School, near Harlan, Iowa. I cannot recall that anyone could not read and write (styled penmanship) with ease from the fifth grade and up.

If Iowa had been teaching a bilingual program, Danish would be my mother tongue, and that is not very valuable in the mainstream business community.